Far Cry 2 is a game I first played back in 2009, very briefly on the Xbox 360.

I didn’t my last long, it was frustrating and really hard and just felt too much like hard work.

Anyway I realised that though bundles and deals I owned all of the Far Cry games and decided that I had best actually play them!

So I recently finished the original Far Cry, the review of which you can see here.

And thus I cracked on with its sequel, Far Cry 2.

To start with, it’s absolutely and completely different from it predecessor. Whilst Far Cry was a run of the mill Sci-Fi shooter, albeit with a very high difficulty level, Far Cry 2 is an open world game very much based in reality.

So how about we start with the positives.

Even 14 years on from its release, it looks good, the open world of the game is beautiful and very realistic in how it’s structured.

The open needed nature of the game, along with the choices you can make along the way give it a lot of character.

The setting is great, very much one that’s not been explored a lot in video games.

But I have a lot of issues with the game.

It feels very schizophrenic, it can’t decide if it wants to be an action-shooter, an RPG or social commentary about the influence of western mercenaries and blood diamonds in Africa.

And it doesn’t do a great job at being any of those.

If really feels like it wants to be an RPG, it really feels like it wants to encourage you to develop you character. But you never really do.

You get a choice of characters, I chose Frank, but it doesn’t feel as if that choice makes any difference in the game, it feels like it plays the same regardless.

And as a shooter, well this might sound weird but there is too much shooting!

See there are two different factions in the game, not that you would know as they are all, without exception going to attack you as soon as they see you, no matter who you are working with.

When you clear out checkpoints, within minutes they are repopulated, and the limited carrying capacity for syringes, the games health packs, mean that sometimes, you get stuck, unable to go back to a checkpoint for fear of the shootout, but unable to go forward for lack of syringes when you face the inevitable shooting.

So for me, I think this is a game that has a lot of potential, but never quite meets it.

So that leads me onto my conclusion.

This is a game that could really do with a remake, and I mean a full in remake, with the RPG elements enhanced, so that for example, when you clear out a checkpoint, you can reman it with the faction you are working with.

I would love to see the militias of the two factions treating you differently depending on how you have played the game.

Anyway let’s get away from what I wish the game could be and onto what the game is.

The game was fun, but difficult, perhaps too difficult. The story was interesting, but the big bad guy was a little generic.

This game sets the foundations for what the series becomes, and in a way it’s groundbreaking.

So I am gonna award it 3 out of 5.

I had the settings at the maximum possible and was getting 60fps constantly, it never dipped or got higher than that.

Hardware

  • CPU:- Ryzen 5 5600X
  • RAM:- 32GB
  • GPU:- RTX 3070
  • Resolution:- 1080p